Established in 1969, Manohar is a publishing house and a bookseller serving individuals and libraries. We export books by mail and have a bookstore at Ansari Road in Delhi.
Manohar initially sold only rare and out of print publications, but soon branched out into local sale/export of new books published in India, and then into publishing of scholarly works under its own imprint.

03 August, 2012

Modernity and Its Agencies: Young Movements in the History of the South

Modernity and
Its Agencies: Young Movements in the History of the South

By- Touraj
Atabaki (ed.)

In the past two
hundred years, for many enlightened individuals, from South Asia to North
Africa, from Persian Gulf to the Adriatic Sea, the main intellectual and
political enquiry was to find a path negotiating the rapidly changing world.
The world, as they saw, was coming out of ‘ignorance’ and heading towards
‘science’ and ‘progress’. Labelling the past with obscurity and calling its
guardians old and reactionary, the enlightened young became the
self-assigned beacons of light leading the masses to a ‘time of progress’.

The word ‘young’
in both the South and the North soon evolved into the classical epithet of
emerging intelligentsias in their struggle against the despotic rule of the ancien
regimes and its supporters, often the clerical establishment. Furthermore,
with the practice of colonialism and imperial expansionism, the Asian, African
or even some European ‘young’ often crafted their identity by rejecting
and defying the other, i.e. the colonial power.

In world history
one finds very few movements which had such widespread social and political
repercussions, simultaneously engulfing at least half of the globe and in the
process of becoming famously known as the Young Movement.

This volume is
the first attempt to study the Young Movement beyond national frontiers.
The contributors to this volume not only shed light on the history of the young
movement in a number of countries and regions, but also compare and contrast
the development of this movement in different parts of Asia and Africa: from
Calcutta to Rabat, from Isfahan to Bukhara and from Istanbul to Kazan.

Touraj
Atabaki is Head, Department of the Middle East and
the Central Asia of the International Institute of Social History and Professor
of Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia at Leiden University.